The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married.
That might have held up the enterprise indefinitely, and we are already so far behind with this attempted wedding of ours that I dare not risk another hold-up. Since serving the notice at Cork Registry Office, it’s a year down the line nearly and the builder boyfriend and I are no nearer to saying: ‘I do.’
Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is
I’m nearer to saying: ‘I really can’t be bothered.’ Or: ‘If anything happens to me just bury me in the garden and don’t tell anyone I’m dead. That way you’ll keep the house with no questions asked, and I doubt anyone will notice.’
Because the main reason I want to get married is through a sense of responsibility to the dear BB, who needs to know it will all be fine if I get run over by the proverbial bus.
Yes, I tried to get a will done when we moved to West Cork. Forget it. There isn’t a single solicitor in Ireland with any availability to do a will for the next 50 years. They’re snowed under with probate. They don’t even answer the phone.
Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is.
We served the notice and produced umpteen bits of paper. We sent off for the original long-form copies of our birth certificates and all that jazz. But the BB did not have an Irish social security number. And when he tried to get one, it turned out that because I own the house and he doesn’t have his name on any of the bills, he could only have one linked to our address, as I do… if he and I were married.
So, yes, to recap, to get this number we have to be married. And to get married, we have to have this number.
There then began a mind-numbingly boring trudge through the strangely slow and impervious bureaucracy of the Emerald Isle. We almost gave up until the local TD intervened on our behalf.
‘What you’ve been through is ridiculous,’ the lady in the benefits office said as she finally issued him the card, to which he’s fully entitled under Anglo-Irish arrangements. All around her Ukrainian refugees were shouting at the staff to hurry up with their rushed-through applications.
It was chaos in there, and the lady was fuming. But we said nothing, even when she said she was not all that convinced about the EU any longer. ‘Oh dear, well, I’m sure it will all sort itself out,’ said the BB. We didn’t want to push our luck. In our experience, the Irish are very happy declaring themselves unhappy, but it’s best not to tell them you think they should be unhappy. That’s a step too far.
Now we were sitting in the cluttered office of the local priest’s bungalow, trying to persuade him to do the service after he missed our previous appointment the week before to discuss this everlasting wedding because he was snowed under with funerals.
He looked absolutely shattered. We sat down in front of his desk, piled up with papers. His big mop of white hair stuck up at various angles, suggesting it hadn’t seen a comb in an age.
I do quite like this priest. I’ve decided it’s best I park my huff about his pro-Palestine stance and devout prayers for the furtherance of the EU project.
The problem with him doing this wedding for us at our advanced time in life is that all the records that need to be located are in England.
My baptism and First Holy Communion in the 1970s would have to be traced, for heaven’s sake. The priest looked up the church it happened in, and told me there was a contact form I could use to ask them about it.
I looked on my phone at the website he was talking about and there was the formidably rotund priest of the Midlands parish where I grew up looking thunderous above a message about Ukraine: ‘Please pray for the confounding of the evil Russian aggression.’
‘Dear God,’ I said, and the Irish priest looked up from his phone. ‘What’s that?’
‘Please don’t make me ring him. Can’t you ring him, and talk, you know, priest to priest?’ If I rang, I would not be able to stop myself telling him what I thought of his anti-Russian stance, and that would be the end of me getting my baptism and First Holy Communion records.
Thankfully, the Irish priest said he would ring the English priest. Then he went again through our religious history, getting nowhere with the builder boyfriend and his peripatetic upbringing with Irish travellers, and his Italian aristocratic bolter of a mother who might or might not have baptised him before she ran off with the gardener.
So long as we could establish I was a Catholic, that would do, he concluded. He would ring the English priest first thing in the morning.
The next afternoon, we saw the priest at the supermarket in the village, hurrying across the car park looking stressed. He had rung the English priest, but the number wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t.
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